Last Friday night at our writer's group meeting, our speaker talked about how important it was to get all five senses (if appropriate) in each scene. And I have to agree. By adding the other senses, we allow our readers to get more involved in each scene.
One thing I did when plotting out my romance novel was to take each scene/chapter and make notes of what the characters would hear, smell, feel, see and possibly taste. Once I knew what those items were, I could then add them in and make the scene richer. (I need to do this for my mystery. *sigh*
Now, you don't want to do an info dump of sensations. That's about as annoying as any other info dump but sprinkle those tidbits in here and there. Weave them in with the rest of the story. Maybe use them in your dialogue tags instead of the classic said.
So, what about you? Do you have trouble getting all or most of the senses in your stories? Got any ideas or tricks you use to get 'em in?
4 comments:
I do have trouble with this, especially since I have no sense of smell to speak of. I have to make my characters smell things and have feelings based on those smells, which unfortunately requires more research than your average writer. LOL I got the other ones down though.
This is always a great tip and I try very hard to make good use of all the senses. I managed to sneak a great one into my current WIP where my MC was leaving home and she walked around touching everything she would miss; I managed to pack in all the senses in a really engaging paragraph.
By the way, you might be interested in my blog post about all of our senses beyond the 5 common ones. You can read it here.
Yep, something I have trouble with. Just have to keep working at it.
I do try to work them all in. It's easy to let sight and hearing dominate though. I'll have to give my mystery's chapters a good looking through! :-)
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